When the federal government created the Social Security Tribunal in 2013, it forgot to ensure one crucial aspect: the publication of its decisions.
As a recent letter signed by 58 lawyers, academics, legal organizations, and others to tribunal chairwoman Murielle Brazeau pointed out, the federal body has so far made public only 148 of the 10,000 decisions it has rendered until now.
The tribunal makes important rulings on the fate of those appealing decisions related to employment insurance, old-age security, and the Canada Pension Plan. As such, it deals with important issues that can have a significant impact on people’s financial situations. And as the letter sent by University of Windsor Faculty of Law Prof. Laverne Jacobs and Osgoode Hall Law School dean Lorne Sossin pointed out, the non-publication of decisions doesn’t affect everyone. The government agencies and departments whose decisions are subject to the tribunal proceedings do receive a copy of all decisions. Producing them for the public, then, can’t be that hard. And there’s an important issue of fairness, of course, as the government bodies have access to the case law that affects future decisions while those applying for benefits don’t. The tribunal’s actions, then, are inconsistent with the open-court principle.
As concerns about the issue have mounted, the tribunal has vowed to address it. It has noted it will publish all of the decisions from the
appeal division this year and has promised to increase the number released by the general division as well. That’s fine, but as the letter suggested, it’s time for the tribunal to make all of its decisions available online with the names removed if necessary. That could possibly take a bit of time, but given that the departments are already receiving the decisions, it should be fairly easy to publish all of them.
The issue is another blight on a tribunal that has struggled with concerns about the backlog of cases for some time. Now is the time for it to show it’s living up to at least some expectations by moving quickly to publish all of its decisions.
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Glenn Kauth
